I Saw the TV Glow (2024), Directed by Jane Schoenbrun © A24 and Fruit Tree
Sometimes the only place we can be ourselves is inside the media we consume. Sometimes that is where we see options, where we feel less “other.”
Watching I Saw the TV Glow, I loved the thought that Jane Schoenbrun’s amazing new film will join a queer film canon in which a viewer can discover themselves, just as older generations did while watching Jennifer’s Body, But I’m a Cheerleader, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
As the film’s press release sums up the plot, “Teenager Owen is just trying to make it through life in the suburbs when his classmate introduces him to a mysterious late-night TV show—a vision of a supernatural world beneath their own. In the pale glow of the television, Owen’s view of reality begins to crack.” The film contains the lingering image of a burning TV set. That image isn’t a mirror, but a portal.
As Maggie Nelson puts it in Like Love, “Life is a dream; that we construct reality in a dreamlike way; that we agree to be in the same dream; and that the only way to change reality is to recognize its dreamlike qualities and act as if it is malleable.” Dreams can be translated into art—books and films and music—and when a person allows themselves to be moved by these works, they can make the ephemeral seem tangible. They’re not just an escape but an alternate reality.
That certainly is how Owen and his older friend Maddy experience The Pink Opaque, the late-night TV show that transforms their lives. Witnessing them watch the glowing TV, I imagined that The Pink Opaque was a metaphor for queer adolescence and that entering its universe felt like feeling the warmth of a womb. It is not uncommon for queer folk to be late bloomers, living through a kind of gestation period, wondering why we don’t want the same things as everyone else.
Their alternate reality isn’t terrifying, exactly, but rather a campy limbo where comedy and erotic yearning combine with an undercurrent of fear, synchronized with a soundtrack that was meticulously chosen to amplify the suffocating atmosphere on screen.
Late in the film, after their friendship has deepened, Maddy sets a boundary with Owen. “I like girls,” she says: “You know that, right?” When Maddy asks if he likes girls too, he says, “I think that I like TV shows.”
Jane Schoenbrun, the film’s writer and director, first won notice at the Sundance Film Festival in 2021 for We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, another film featuring teenagers exploring online media as a way of wrestling with gender dysphoria. In a recent interview with the Verge, Schoenbrun explained how her films form part of a larger, and more ambitious literary project: “Public Access After World is a trilogy of books I’m writing that are essentially my Dune. It’s my epic and me trying to do Buffy, Lost, or Harry Potter. I’ve created this huge mythology about a giant cast of characters with a story that spans centuries and sprawls across alternate universes. It’s got a scope that a 90-minute film couldn’t hold, and it’s about transition, becoming, and truly closing that gap between self and screen until you feel like you’re approximating some form of real life.”
I was not surprised to learn that Jane Schoenbrun was a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan. When Maddy and Owen go to a bar called “The Double Lunch,” it resembles “The Bronze,” the club where Buffy slays vampires and dances seductively to nineties rock. It’s in this scene that the soundtrack features Phoebe Bridgers and Sloppy Jane singing a siren song, “Claw Machine”:
But my heart is like a claw machine
It’s only function is to reach
It can’t hold on to anything
No, I can’t hold on to anything
The song is about wanting something just out of reach and not finding the courage to grasp it.
Everything in I Saw The TV Glow feels both claustrophobic and apocalyptic. The characters aren’t fighting any tangible threat, just the boredom of suburbia and an inchoate restlessness. This restlessness is a product of their dreaming in the light of the TV screen and finding the truth of their desires in the dark.
Another key song on the film’s soundtrack is “Riding Around in the Dark,” by the indie rock group Florist. As wistfully sung by Emily Sprague, its lyrics give voice to the feelings of Owen and Maddy:
You know the things that I said in the parking lot
You know the things that I say in the dark
Indeed, the soundtrack for the film is an artifact in itself. It begins with a new version of “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl,” a song first popularized by the Canadian indie rock band Broken Social Scene. The new version by Yeule (aka Nat Ćmiel, a Singaporean producer who specializes in ambient post pop), features glitchy vocals, giving it a distinctly Gen Z sound. It is just as dreamy as the original but transformed through technology, as if dreaming is inseparable from the online sphere. Listening to the song again, I feel underwater. I feel the suffocating atmosphere of the film, and also a certain yearning for a time that I never actually experienced.
My favorite frame of the entire film is of chalk on asphalt, preaching THERE IS STILL TIME. A purple glow permeates the vision of a cul de sac, white picket fence, and hazy summer afternoon. There is this other self, the uncanny, not your current self but the you that did X, Y, and Z differently. We see ourselves reflected in media like a funhouse mirror—the people we follow, the camera lens, a constant stream of opinions—so often that when we reach a proper mirror, we can hardly trust it. People talk about the importance of representation, but this is what visibility looks like. Not homonormative, parroting back the cis-het agenda, but in the margins, the other.
As was the case for many folks, the pandemic made me examine myself differently. It called me to pull the memories off their shelves and really consider the shape of them, turning them over in my hands—that high school homoerotic friendship, that exchange student from Australia who kissed me at a party, my obsession with Phoebe Bridgers. I remember when Phoebe posted a picture of herself winking, pulling on the brim of her cowboy hat and wrote, “Howdy from a visible bisexual”—I was so obsessed with her music but hadn’t thought much about her sexuality. Maybe I’d assumed or hoped, but then she just said it, plainly, in a funny, approachable way. It feels silly to say that I became more comfortable with that word because she had used it, but it’s true. I used to say I hated labels and didn’t want one, but I think I was just afraid of being something that needed an explanation.
Around this same time, I discovered Maggie Nelson and read The Argonauts. I’ve always wanted children, and I could finally see what a queer family could be—something that was never modeled for me in my conservative hometown. I don’t begrudge where I come from, but I’m so grateful I was able to broaden the media I consumed beyond what is popular in South Carolina. It helped me see myself better, more clearly. It was the first stage of my becoming.
In the final days of Pride Month, my friend invited me to the Dyke March here in New York. Being a person who still has attraction to men, I was nervous about the word dyke. Beyond that, I’ve felt unsure about my place in the community, now that I don’t have a girlfriend to point to and say, “Look, I belong.” There’s still a fear that lingers, even after a two-year relationship with a woman, that I am not queer enough. Being unsure of my presentation—sometimes masc, but mostly femme—I didn’t want to take up space or use a word I hadn’t yet claimed. It had been used against me, when I was younger and wearing Birkenstocks in South Carolina, but it has never been a word that seemed mine to reclaim. I asked my friend if it was really, truly okay for me to attend. They told me to think of it as a political stance, saying, “I fuck women and I reject our assimilation into a cis-hetero society.” Sapphic feels romantic, obviously poetic, but sanitized and discreet. Dyke is real and angry. I like it.
Seeing yourself in characters, authors, actors, and lyrics is often a first step. It is the projection. The portal occurs when the lines begin to blur, when you start acknowledging it. The real transformation is what happens when a friend takes your hand and listens to your secrets in the dark until you can speak them in the daylight. You need a friend to get a beer with you after watching a film that made you nearly speechless, a person in your life to help you find the right words. The internet can provide that community, but it’s you who must reach for it. While the screen helps you see beyond yourself, the reach happens within, like when Owen’s chest opened and the purple glow spilled outward. You project, saying, “I’m like that, or I feel that way,” until you can crack the cavern of your body and see the contours of your humanity, see the love and desire all tangled up in there, until you can admit that you might want something different, something more than what you’ve been able to dream previously.
The closing lines of Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival” reflects this back to me:
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraidSo it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.
To speak is to cross the screen, make a projection tangible. It is to leave the TV set burning in the yard, to call yourself a dyke—maybe quietly at first. To be in community, to feel the flesh of the “other,” and embrace them. This film is not about overcoming the fear of being “other,” but a much bigger fear—having the other inside of you and never letting it see the sun. It is the fear of never leaving the pink opaque, losing youth, but the message remains: THERE IS STILL TIME.
